The AWEA Blog: Into the Wind


Fact check: Bryce, Bentek miss on emissions

Posted: 2011-07-20 Michael Goggin, AWEA Manager-Transmission Policy

The fossil fuel lobby continues its misinformation campaign to muddy the waters about one of the indisputable benefits of wind energy--its success in reducing the use of fossil fuels and the harmful emissions associated with their use. The latest attack on clean energy comes from Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Exxon-Mobil-funded Manhattan Institute, who in a Forbes piece regurgitates a report written by Bentek, a natural gas consulting firm whose President and CEO happens to be the Chairman and Director of the Natural Gas Committee of the fossil fuel lobby group the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States, as well as a member of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association.
 
Unsurprisingly, the Bentek report is directly contradicted by a large body of government data and numerous studies by independent grid operators conclusively showing that the emissions savings of adding wind energy to the grid are substantially larger than had been expected. Bentek’s report is filled with a number of salient errors, most notably that the authors used a method that takes very small snapshots of the power grid in both time and geographic space, and thus overlooks a large share of the emissions savings produced by wind energy. As an example, Bentek’s methodology gives wind energy deployed in California or in the Pacific Northwest no credit for the emissions reductions achieved by reducing coal electricity imported from other states, which is a main reason why the report so grossly understated the actual emissions benefit of wind in those regions. As another example, its methodology gives wind energy credit for only one hour of emissions savings when it forces a coal power plant to turn off for a much longer period of time, and gives no credit to wind energy when it allows the grid operator to store additional water behind a hydroelectric dam that is used to displace fossil generation later on, both of which are common events. The flaws in Bentek’s work are too numerous to discuss here, although the following fact sheet lists many of them as well as providing the detailed results of government data and grid operator studies that conclusively show that wind energy significantly reduces fossil fuel use and emissions: The Facts About Wind Energy and Emissions.

 

More reading:

 

Fact check: Bryce stumbles on land use, sound, steel, benefits, June 8, 2011

Fact check: Bryce continues cherry-picking crusade in National Review, May 18, 2011
Fact check: Robert Bryce misleads with WSJ op-ed, December 23, 2010
Fact check: Bryce omits mention of fossil fuel subsidies, December 14, 2010
Robert Bryce runs afoul of another reviewer, September 14, 2010
Power hungry? Or just on a low-fact diet? (review by AWEA's Michael Goggin of Robert Bryce book)


7 responses

  1. Andy Dawson August 15, 2011 01:43PM
    in reply to "John" I can't speak for US conditions, but here in the UK, our politicians have committed strongly to wind. Add to that the fact that our deregulation structure means that our "Department of Energy and Climate Change" has required National Grid to make its planning documents publically available, and we've got a decent picture emerging. Broadly, Grid states pretty directly that we require (installed wind capacity*average capacity factor) available as rapidly dispatchable reserve - available in 1-3 hours at worst. That means as hydro, idle OCGT, or "spinning reserve" coal or CCGT. We normally keep about 4GW of such reserve for normal unit loss (about 10% of our average load), that will have to rise to 8GW with 16-20GW of connected wind. We'll also have to retain 100% back-up dispatchable on a 12-24 hours basis. Now, note in that, Grid's regulatory formula incentivises it to connect wind (its permitted revenues tie to the total asset value of the network), so, if anything it's likely to present an optimistic picture.
  2. Rod Adams July 22, 2011 04:56PM
    @Tom Gray - so, how long has it been that we have been having this discussion about the unreliability of wind - I think we first engaged on the topic nearly 20 years ago on USENET. In that time, wind turbines have not gotten much more reliable, just bigger and slightly more efficient. The fact of the matter is that wind must depend on the grid to offer low cost "smoothing" services. No one would build a wind farm without a generous combination of direct subsidy payments (in lieu of production tax credits), renewable energy certificates, renewable mandates, state tax write offs, and accelerated depreciation schedules. As Robert Kennedy Jr. told the Colorado Oil and Gas Association in July 2010, a large wind or solar project is a gas project. Check out the video clip here: http://atomicinsights.com/2010/11/robert-f-kennedy-jr-tells-the-colorado-oil-and-gas-association-that-wind-and-solar-plants-are-gas-plants.html
  3. Greg Meyerson July 21, 2011 11:33AM
    If you give credit to wind for allowing hydro to store additional water, do you penalize wind when water has to be released to smooth wind power's fluctuations and intermittency? water that could have been saved down the road to replace fossil fuels?
  4. Greg Meyerson July 21, 2011 11:25AM
    hmm: so renewable energy does not partner with natural gas? this is what you imply. but even the german green party acknowledges the necessity of gas back up to avoid coal. to say that wind does not rely on back up makes no sense. You might note that the Bentek study had wind doing better than expected in midwest. is this because they avoid methodological flaws committed in other parts of the study? Readers may go to bravenewclimate to see debates with michael goggin. www.bravenewclimate.com
  5. Steve Aplin July 21, 2011 10:16AM
    I echo John's comment and especially his point #1. Wind cannot survive on a grid unless it is backed up with some fossil source (coal and simple-cycle gas are best -- by they are also the most CO2/NOx/SOx intensive). And with wind capacity factors so abysmally low, we all know what will provide by far most of the actual electrons. So much for "low carbon." My home province, Ontario, is actually seeing good wind output as I write this -- 629 megawatts output, which is a 52 percent capability factor. Problem is, wind has dropped output two hours in a row. Total generation increased over the same two hours. And two days ago, in the same heat wave, wind's capability factor was not even three percent during the peak hours. Why are we wasting our money.
  6. John July 21, 2011 09:10AM
    The points I find confusing in all the point vs.counterpoint is: (1) how much conventional generation (coal, gas, etc.) must actuallyt be kept in reserve (spinning or otherwise) to deal with the intermittancy of wind power. The implication being, rather than having wind reduce fossil emissions -- every committment to wind energy brings along with it a need for additional gas turbine backup generators. Is this not correct? (2) as the penetration of wind energy into the grid becomes larger - WHEN can we expect to see actual availability, forced outage rates, and capacity factors in readily available data sources such as NERC's Generation Availability Data System (GADS)?
  7. Tom Gray July 20, 2011 03:10PM
    Mr. Bryce is clearly a master of irony--his latest BS (bad science) begins with the sentence "Facts are pesky things," a remarkable assertion for someone whose acquaintance with facts is clearly minimal.--Regards, Tom Gray, Wind Energy Communications Consultant

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